Gorbachev Era Ending

Soviet President Expected To Announce Resignation Today

MOSCOW — Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev bade a dignified farewell to his Kremlin staff Tuesday and scheduled a televised speech for today in which, by all accounts, he will resign.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who inherits Gorbachev's mantle as leader of a nuclear superpower, said that Gorbachev would pass him the launch controls for Soviet strategic weapons immediately after the expected resignation speech, the Russian Information Agency reported.

The transfer of the nuclear suitcase, which holds the codes needed for firing thousands of warheads, many of them aimed at the United States, will mark the symbolic inauguration of a world leader and the departure of one of the 20th century's key political figures.

In another sign of the transfer of power, Russia notified the United Nations on Tuesday that it was taking over the Soviet Union's U.N. seat as well as all of the old state's political and financial obligations.

Violence continued in parts of the crumbled empire that Gorbachev will leave behind. In Tibilisi, Georgia, rebels shelled the parliament building in an attempt to drive out President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, and at least 20 Armenians and Azerbaijanis were reported killed in clashes in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

In Moscow, the Council of the Republics, the only one of the central Soviet parliament's two chambers still functioning, convened to discuss how best to dissolve now that the country it represents no longer exists. It decided to hold a final session Thursday and is expected to recognize the Commonwealth of Independent States as the Soviet Union's legal successor.

Gorbachev's resignation has been expected almost daily since Saturday when 11 former Soviet republics signed the agreement creating the commonwealth, in effect making him president of a non-existent country.

According to reports from his final Kremlin meeting, Gorbachev thanked his staff of about 60 for their work, promised they would not remain unemployed and said that he had achieved what he had worked for but wished that things had turned out differently.

Throughout the day, an aide said, the Soviet president had masses of documents copied. Other staffers were shredding their work papers.

Officials ranging from the Soviet president's spokesmen to Deputy Russian Prime Minister Gennady Burbulis said that Gorbachev would resign by tonight.

His televised address to the splintered nation of 290 million, which he has led since early 1985, was scheduled to air live at 7 p.m. Moscow time (noon EST) and last about 15 minutes.

The terms of Gorbachev's resignation, worked out with Yeltsin in a prolonged meeting Monday, ''will allow him to continue his political and civic activity,'' Burbulis said. The Soviet president reportedly will receive his current monthly salary of 4,000 rubles - $44 according to the tourist exchange rate but about 80 times a factory worker's pay - a city apartment, a dacha, two cars and 20 bodyguards and servants.

Gorbachev told the Italian ambassador to Moscow Tuesday that he planned to head an international political and economic research center known as the Gorbachev Fund. He emphasized that his aim was not to directly oppose the Yeltsin administration but to further the ideals that underlay his perestroika reforms.

In the near term, he plans to use his international prestige to lobby for Western aid for Yeltsin and the former Soviet republics as they struggle through painful reforms, Gorbachev spokesman Alexander Likhotal said.